Fatland

Yet these absurd naming conventions are only further signs that the Narrative is now developing yawning gaps. For the current world crisis, like almost every other crisis is caused as much by what went right in the last 70 years as what went wrong. And the problem with the Narrative is that what should have gone wrong went right and what ought to have gone right went wrong.

What should have gone wrong is exemplified by Paul Ehrlich, a collaborator of President Obama's current science adviser John Holdren. Ehrlich claimed on the first Earth Day in 1970 that "[i]n ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish." He predicted in 1971 speech that: "by the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people ... If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000."

It didn't happen.

What should have gone right is summarized by Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man. The Blue Model was supposed to have taken over the world. "What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."

It didn't happen either.

The world is now going through a period in which among other things, the public mind is trying to get around what parts of the Narrative are still true; and how much has been falsified by history. The New Narrative, if it is to emerge, must be a sync with Reality. And in these cases the merge conflicts are where the action is. Naseem Taleb once observed that the really significant information in a given situation lies in what doesn't fit the theory, for that indicates more precisely than in the conformities where the system needs to change.

Cosmologists have recently been debating what the failure of a survey to find Dark Matter signifies. "A survey of the galactic region around our solar system by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has turned up a surprising lack of dark matter, making its alleged existence even more of a mystery." The good news is that when they eventually do find something, it may not be Dark Matter at all but a new and better way of understanding our universe.